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1After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some
2reason. And in the garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes, sufficient to stay my hunger. From
3this garden one looked down upon Putney and the river. The aspect of the place in the dusk was singularly desolate:
4blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with the weed.
5And over all--silence. It filled me with indescribable terror to think how swiftly that desolating change had come. For
6a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive.
7Hard by the top of Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the arms dislocated and removed several yards from the
8rest of the body. As I proceeded I became more and more convinced that the extermination of mankind was, save for such
9stragglers as myself, already accomplished in this part of the world. The Martians, I thought, had gone on and left the
10country desolated, seeking food elsewhere. Perhaps even now they were destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they
11had gone northward. VII. THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL. I spent that night in the inn that stands at the top of Putney Hill,
12sleeping in a made bed for the first time since my flight to Leatherhead. I will not tell the needless trouble I had
13breaking into that house--afterwards I found the front door was on the latch--nor how I ransacked every room for food,
14until just on the verge of despair, in what seemed to me to be a servant's bedroom, I found a rat-gnawed crust and two
15tins of pineapple. The place had been already searched and emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and
16sandwiches that had been overlooked. The latter I could not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed my
17hunger, but filled my pockets. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian might come beating that part of London for food in
18the night. Before I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness, and prowled from window to window, peering out for
19some sign of these monsters. I slept little. As I lay in bed I found myself thinking consecutively--a thing I do not
20remember to have done since my last argument with the curate. During all the intervening time my mental condition had
21been a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupid receptivity. But in the night my brain,
22reinforced, I suppose, by the food I had eaten, grew clear again, and I thought. Three things struggled for possession
23of my mind: the killing of the curate, the whereabouts of the Martians, and the possible fate of my wife. The former
24gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall; I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable
25but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty
26blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory,
27static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes
28comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I
29retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst,
30and pointing to the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We had been incapable of
31co-operation--grim chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford. But I did not
32foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all this story down, as it was. There were no
33witnesses--all these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as he will.
34And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a prostrate body, I faced the problem of the Martians and the
35fate of my wife. For the former I had no data; I could imagine a hundred things, and so, unhappily, I could for the
36latter. And suddenly that night became terrible. I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. I found myself
37praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my return from
38Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in
39extremity; but now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the darkness of God. Strange
40night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat
41leaving its hiding place--a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our
42masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely, if we have learned nothing
43else, this war has taught us pity--pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion. The morning was bright and
44fine, and the eastern sky glowed pink, and was fretted with little golden clouds. In the road that runs from the top of
45Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of the panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the
46Sunday night after the fighting began. There was a little two-wheeled cart inscribed with the name of Thomas Lobb,
47Greengrocer, New Malden, with a smashed wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a straw hat trampled into the now
48hardened mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot of blood-stained glass about the overturned water trough. My movements
49were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I had an idea of going to Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the poorest
50chance of finding my wife. Certainly, unless death had overtaken them suddenly, my cousins and she would have fled
51thence; but it seemed to me I might find or learn there whither the Surrey people had fled. I knew I wanted to find my
52wife, that my heart ached for her and the world of men, but I had no clear idea how the finding might be done. I was
53also sharply aware now of my intense loneliness. From the corner I went, under cover of a thicket of trees and bushes,
54to the edge of Wimbledon Common, stretching wide and far. That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and
55broom; there was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on the verge of the open, the sun rose, flooding
56it all with light and vitality. I came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place among the trees. I stopped to
57look at them, drawing a lesson from their stout resolve to live. And presently, turning suddenly, with an odd feeling of
58being watched, I beheld something crouching amid a clump of bushes. I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it,
59and it rose up and became a man armed with a cutlass. I approached him slowly. He stood silent and motionless, regarding
60me. As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though
61he had been dragged through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches mixing with the pale drab of
62dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and sunken, so
63that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut across the lower part of his face. "Stop!" he cried, when I
64was within ten yards of him, and I stopped. His voice was hoarse. "Where do you come from?" he said. I thought,
65surveying him. "I come from Mortlake," I said. "I was buried near the pit the Martians made about their cylinder. I have
66worked my way out and escaped." "There is no food about here," he said. "This is my country. All this hill down to the
67river, and back to Clapham, and up to the edge of the common. There is only food for one. Which way are you going?" I
68answered slowly. "I don't know," I said. "I have been buried in the ruins of a house thirteen or fourteen days. I don't
69know what has happened." He looked at me doubtfully, then started, and looked with a changed expression.
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